3mo ago

Why is Lemmy so much faster than reddit?

I use eternity for Lemmy, no matter how trash my internet is, everything loads so fast!

46 comments

Probably all the ad tracking shit running in the background.
Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.
I also wouldn't put it past them to intentionally slow down people who aren't logged in.
- I'm pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day's Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day's server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it'd typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn't have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.
  
  There was corpo phrasing in that...
  It was amount of gold equal to server time assuming all the gold was bought.
  But mods would get a shit ton to give out. And towards the end when you got gold you got "coins" as well that could be used to give gold.
  Like, say I want to make "Fun Time bucks" a thing. To drive adoption I'm going to give out free fun time bucks to everyone, they spend because it's free, and people start seeing it as valid.
  Reddit was pumping gold so people saw it and hopefully they bought it because they assumed everyone else was buying it. But most of it was "free" gold.
  
  I totally forgot about that gold meter for server costs.
  I miss that Reddit.
  
  There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day's Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day's server costs.
  There were always people costs too, and plenty of others. Breaking even on infrastructure doesn't stop the bleed of the venture capital. And investors do expect a return.
- I know for a fact they have wait() code in there. If you try to do anything on a thread the OP has blocked you, it takes 10s or so minimum.
- I use infinity for reddit, not sure if ad tracking is there but images take forever to load
- This. Iv also noticed whenever using reddit (which i almost never do at this point) there is a big red banner at the top warning of server errors.
- Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.
  Can you elaborate on this? No doubt you are right, but specific examples of how cost cutting leads to (the false appearance of) profitability here would be helpful.

looks under desk and pats the Dell Optiplex server
- This gave me a chuckle. Lol

Because Lemmy isn’t running a thousand tracking scripts, and they’re not intentionally making the mobile website barely functional to push you to an app where they can track even more.
- I use infinity for reddit not the website and images take too long to load
  
  It is plausible that they might slow down traffic coming in via those 3rd party apps. Certainly they know, for example, who uses Infinity vs the Reddit app. Obviously they want to control the client to force ads on users.

Much smaller user base, distributed servers, modern code (versus reddit's ancient code), less enshittification in the code (reddit's various manipulative algorithms).
- Eh, the code is very inefficient.
  
  Yeah... Lemmy's code and the way it implements activity pub is not the greatest... A lack of batch operations means that every single federated like is an HTTP request of its own.
- It's probably down to how much random crap is being loaded along with what you're trying to see. The modern web means page load takes forever, in part because of all the random things your browser also has to pull down. Some of this content need to be loaded before you can render much of anything and some of that will result in calls to yet more random servers. Look at the network tab in your browser's dev tools to see what I'm talking about. Without an ad blocker you're probably looking at calls to 10-20 servers just to load a webpage.
  The old reddit API was actually pretty snappy, in part because it didn't need a lot of this overhead. I suspect the same is true for Lemmy - no extra fluff.
  
  And distributed over more than a thousand nerd servers :-)

Reddit is running on a potato.
Lemmy is running on several distributed potatoes, with a much smaller user load per tuber (and many orders of magnitude less bots).

old.reddit.com has always loaded quickly, except their self hosted photos and videos, which is a (relatively) new thing and has never loaded fast.

I think this is instance dependent. Midwest.social is super slow for me frequently and times out a lot depending on the time of day.
- It is certainly instance dependent, as they would all be running in different servers.

More athletic hamsters and we keep the wheel well lubricated.
- ideologically motivated hamsters too. they fucking HATE spez.

You may just be connecting to a server that is much closer, there are also more smaller servers for a much smaller client based too. People who host these servers are usually in the IT community and probably hella overspecd the server vs userbase size too. Lemmy is also an open source project that has a lot of eyes to solve and fix issues
- probably hella overspecd the server vs userbase size too
  properly specd by ensuring that the system could handle spikes in activity.
  
  That's pretty well what I was getting at, IT peeps have a brain usually

Probably less javascript. In theory, javascript makes sites faster because it diverts processing to the user's browser. In reality, developers use it to load all sorts of frameworks, third party whatevers, and other crap that slows things down. In other words, the same reason old websites load fast.
- Also the reddit app is absolute steaming garbage that tries to throw ads and videos at you constantly.
  So much of our software is slowed down by what's basically ad analytics, because we have to remember, the ads are the actual product here.

It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.
My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.

Lemmy doesn't have any code in it whose only purpose is to maximize profit (e.g. code for showing ads) but isn't necessary for functionality. Also, the decentralized nature means that any given instance has to serve only a subset of users, not all of them like reddit does.

Reddit's backend is absolute junk and not designed for efficiency from the ground up, they just keep throwing more servers in and solve the efficiency bottlenecks with a shitload of caching. A site whose meat and potatoes is text comments and links just shouldn't be this crap at it.
Lemmy has the benefit of hindsight in design and the fact that each server is only really responsible for a subset of all Lemmy users.

There used to be reddit.com/.compact . It was lightning quick to load and browse even on load end devices because its wasn't graphics/javascript heavy. When reddit removed the ".compact" view it was the first thing that made me look for an alternative. The API changes was another.

Fewer people sucking up bandwidth on top of everything being split up across multiple servers to further lessen the load. Shoulda seen the first month or so after the APPocalypse when everyone and their mother was on Lemmy.World and it started to get hella bogged down until a few knowledgeable people pointed out that it would work better if everyone spread out to different instances.

... And also Eternity is uber cool!
- Eternity was already based when it was a Reddit app. Hopefully it will see mbin support soon™.

it drinks more coffee

Thank you all for the informative comments!

No or way less obtrusive analytics.

no ads

Unrelated but does Eternity correctly support Links now? (to comments / threads)
This drove me to Jerboa, but I prefer Eternity's UI so I'd be pleased to go back if that's fixed.
- The app is still broken. I still have it installed and it has some really annoying quirks. I use voyager and it's solid.
  
  I tried Voyager but status bar is white in dark mode, I can't see anything

46 comments